The Marketing Edge (283)

We can’t resist looking at short videos. Our eyes are naturally attracted to the movement and colors. In fact, Animoto reports that “4 times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.”

If you want your pay-per-click campaign to succeed, you need to consistently monitor and manage it. Because the bidding auction is continuously changing with the addition of new advertisers and keywords, managing these campaigns can require some additional knowledge. There are multiple ways to ensure that your campaign is performing its best.

Do you have a brand-new website? Ensuring your web pages are optimized for search engines is the first step in the search engine optimization (SEO) process. Choosing relevant keywords, making sure those keywords are repeated through your content, and specifying title tags, meta descriptions and more can give your website a solid foundation to build from, but did you know that there are blogging tips to improve SEO?

High-quality graphic design tools are expensive – there’s no question about that. If you’re a business on a budget, but need great design to help with your marketing efforts, you might be wondering where to find the best free graphic design tools. There are a ton out there, but these stand out from the rest due to their high-quality and lack of subscription fees.

If you’re new to pay-per-click advertising and want to get started on a campaign for your business, the first and most important step is learning how to do keyword research. Keywords are relevant words to help people find the products or services your business offers. Your selection of keywords can include a combination of single words and search phrases like “coffee” and “gourmet iced coffee.”

About two years ago, Google opened Gmail Sponsored Promotions, also known as GSP, to all advertisers. Gmail Sponsored Promotions are advertisements that show up in personal Gmail boxes in the social and promotions tabs.

Paid search advertisements are a form of marketing within the sponsored listings of a search engine. These can be charged in one of two ways: by paying each time your ad is clicked or each time your ad is displayed. Pay-per-click, also known as PPC, is the most common form of paid search advertising and charges advertisers each time their ads are clicked, while cost-per-impression charges advertisers each time their ad is displayed.

Paid search advertisements are an effective way to market your business online, but if you’re not sure how they work, how to set them up or how to track their effectiveness, this is for you!

Reaching people interested in your product or service must be done in steps – the first of which is determining your target audience.

Once you’ve discovered who is most interested in what you offer, connecting with them comes next. To reach potential customers, you don’t have to search high and low. Instead, you can turn to a tool billions of people use every day: Facebook. This popular social media platform has plenty of tools for businesses hoping to reach their target audience. With Facebook advertising tools you can be as broad or as specific as you’d like so you can engage potential customers.

With over 500 million active monthly users and an average of 95 million photos and videos shared every day, Instagram is a powerful visual tool that can engage audiences far and wide. eMarketer reported that in 2015 48.8 percent of brands used Instagram. They also predicted that number would rise to 70.7 percent in 2017, surpassing Twitter.

Open an app, take a quick photo, set a timer and send it along to any friends you choose. Snapchat, now called “Snap,” is as simple as that for users of the popular platform, which has over 100 million daily active users, according to Hootsuite. Since the launch of Snapchat in 2011, it has evolved to offer new and exciting features – not just for your average user, but also for business. With snapchatters watching over 10 billion videos per day, using Snapchat for business may be something you should consider.